ELEVEN SHORT POMAK RIDDLES

translated by Denis Ferhatović

1. Something that’s like a foot.
2. Something that’s like a hand.
3. A four-legged thing.
4. A two-legged animal.
5. A bullock in a very hot oven.
   The oven dries up, but he never does.
6. A thing with two legs. 
   One runs to catch the other, but it never does.
7. A one-legged hen.
8. Four brothers in a single house.
9. Two friends in a round house. 
   One of them is yellow, the other white.
10. A thing eats all day, but it never gets full.
11. A thing made neither of iron nor wood
    Is nevertheless a powerful machine.
    It makes four thousand moves per hour.

SOLUTIONS:

A NOTE FROM THE TRANSLATOR:

These riddles were composed in Pomak, a South Slavic variety spoken by Muslims in Thrace, Greece, and written in the Greek alphabet. Another one of its fascinating features is that it uses Slavic words for numbers 1 to 4, and Turkish words for 5 and above. I accessed these short strange, surreal enigmata in Petros D. Theocharidēs’s book, Pomakoi: hoi Mousoulmanoi tēs Rodopēs : historia, katagōgē, glōssa, thrēskeia, laographika (Xanthē: Ekdosē Politistikou Anaptuxiakou Kentrou Thrakēs, 1995), pages 513-515.